The Valparaiso Voyage. Dermot Bolger

for me and raised my arms over my face. His teeth had brushed my jacket when I heard a thump of a steel pole against his flank. He turned to snarl at his attacker as somebody pulled me up. It was a tall black man, around thirty years of age. The black girl knelt beside us, crying, cramming items into her purse. A smaller, stockier black man banged a steel pole along the concrete, holding the dog off. The black girl turned to me.

      ‘Don’t you call me stupid! Don’t you ever!’

      ‘Stop it, Ebun,’ the man holding me said. He looked into my face. ‘E ma bínú. Can you walk?’

      ‘Just give me a second.’

      ‘We haven’t got a second. More of your sort will be back.’

      ‘They’re not my sort.’

      ‘They’re hardly mine.’ He bent down to retrieve my glasses from the ground. ‘You should get out of here. Have you a car?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Where do you live?’

      ‘Abroad.’

      ‘Where are you staying then?’

      ‘I don’t know yet. Somewhere.’

      The girl, Ebun, looked over her shoulder towards the windows of the flats. ‘He’s the one who’s stupid,’ she said. ‘He jumped right in.’

      With a final snarl the dog loped off back towards the entrance. There was a shout from a stairwell. I knew they wanted to get away from there.

      ‘He’d better come with us,’ the man told Ebun.

      She answered in a language I couldn’t understand. My courage had vanished now that the fight was over, I was unsure if my legs would support me.

      ‘I know,’ the man replied. ‘But we can’t leave him here.’

      The stockier man put the steel pole back inside his coat. Arguing in their own language, they half-led and half-carried me back onto Dorset Street, past a row of rundown shops and around the corner into Gardner Street. Their flat was at the top of a narrow Georgian house, with wooden steps crumbling away and rickety woodwormed banisters. I had once haunted the warrens of bedsits around here, knowing every card school in the anonymity of flatland where one could sit up all night to play poker and smoke dope.

      But the journey up the stairs now had a dream-like quality. Every face that appeared on each landing was black or Eastern European. I had spent a decade abroad, but somehow in my mind Ireland had never changed. Maybe they didn’t hang black people in Navan for being the Devil any more, but before I left the occasional black visitor was still a novelty, a chance to show our patronizing tolerance which distinguished us from racist Britain. We had always been an exporter of people, our politicians pleading the special case of illegal Irish immigrants living out subterranean existences in Boston and New York. So, with our new-found prosperity, why did I not expect the boot to be on the other foot? Ebun unlocked a door and they helped me onto a chair in their one-room flat. She put some ice from the tiny fridge into a plastic supermarket bag. Kneeling beside the chair she held it against my forehead.

      ‘To keep the swelling down,’ she said. ‘You were crazy brave. I should not have shouted at you.’

      ‘I didn’t mean to call you names. I just wanted to make you run.’

      ‘I don’t run,’ she said. ‘No more running. I see too much to run any more.’

      The men talked in low voices in their own language. Another man joined them, staring at me with open curiosity. I tried to stand up, wanting to escape back down onto the street. These damp walls reminded me too much of things I had spent a lifetime fleeing. I wondered at what time the bus station closed.

      ‘Where are you going?’ Ebun pushed me back. ‘You have been hit. You must rest.’ She adjusted the ice-pack slightly.

      ‘He saw everything,’ the stocky man said. ‘I know those kids. This time we have a witness. I say we call the police.’

      ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘I can’t.’

      ‘Can’t what? Go against your own kind?’

      ‘It’s not that.’

      ‘Leave him alone,’ Ebun said. ‘What’s the use of a court case in six months’ time? By then we could have all been put on a plane back to Nigeria. Besides, a policeman anywhere is still a policeman. We should never trust them.’

      ‘We thank you for your help,’ the man who had picked me up said. ‘This should not have happened. I tell my sister not to go out alone, but do you think she listens? Have you eaten?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘We have something. It is hot.’

      I had smelt the spices when I entered the flat. The stocky man went to the cooker and ladled something into a soup dish. ‘E gba,’ he said, handing me what looked like a sort of oily soup. ‘It is called egusi. My name is Niyi.’ He smiled but I knew he was uneasy with my presence. Ebun removed the ice-pack and they talked among themselves as I ate. Finally her brother approached.

      ‘Tonight you have nowhere to stay?’

      ‘Nowhere arranged as yet.’

      ‘Then we have a mattress. You are welcome.’

      I had enough money for a hotel. I was about to say this when I looked at Ebun’s face and the still half-antagonistic Niyi. Strangers adrift in a strange land, refugees who had left everything behind, who lived by queuing, never knowing when news would come of their asylum application being turned down. This flat was all they possessed.

      ‘I would be grateful,’ I replied.

      ‘Lekan ni oruko mi. My name is Lekan.’ He held his hand out. I shook it.

      ‘My name is Cormac,’ I lied, with the ease of ten years’ practice.

      Lekan led me across the landing to a small bathroom. The seat was broken on the toilet, which had an ancient cistern and long chain. I washed my face, gazing in the mirror at my slightly grazed forehead. Then I peered out of the small window: rooftops with broken slates, blocks of flats in the distance, old church spires dwarfed by an army of building cranes, the achingly familiar sounds of this hurtful city.

      A few streets away the woman I had been taught to call ‘Mother’ lay dying in hospital. Out in the suburbs beyond these old streets the woman I had once called ‘wife’ lived with the boy who once called me ‘Father’. Conor’s seventeenth birthday was in two months’ time, yet he lived on in my mind the way he had looked when he was seven.

      On the landing the Nigerians were bargaining in a language I could not understand and then in English as they borrowed blankets to make up a spare bed. My forehead hurt. Everywhere my eyes strayed across the rooftops brought memories of pain, so why was my body swamped by the bittersweet elation of having come home?

       II SUNDAY

      Asofa with scratched wooden arms that probably even looked cheap when purchased in the 1970s; a purple flower-patterned carpet; one battered armchair; a Formica table that belonged in some 1960s fish and chip shop; an ancient windowpane with its paint and putty almost fully peeled away. I woke up on Sunday morning in Ebun’s flat and felt more at home than I had done for years.

      A solitary shaft of dusty light squeezed between a gap in the two blankets tacked across the window as makeshift curtains. It fell on Niyi’s bare feet as he sat on the floor against the far wall watching me. He nodded, his gaze not unfriendly but territorial in the way of a male wary of predators in the presence of his woman.

      I looked around. One sleeping-bag was already rolled up against the wall. Ebun occupied the double bed, her hair spilling out from the blankets as she slept on, curled in a ball.